Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts degree.

MFA Program for Writers

Warren Wilson College

March, 2002

By

Champa Bilwakesh

When I was younger, and my feelings were intense and yearnings immense, I used to make frequent trips to India. When I arrived back home from my "home" in India, I would look at the suitcase and the carry-on bag with weariness. Only a few weeks before in Boston I had packed this enormous, cavernous suitcase with gifts of clothes, toys, electronic gadgets, chocolates, liquor, perfumes, bottles of Centrum vitamins, my saris and petticoats that I would wear in India, and then had triumphantly zipped and locked it. Now my suitcase lay open, packed differently, with my mother's mind planning the space and logistics. I saw her hands in the design. On the very top would sit the packet of the special powdered spice mixture of coriander, cumin and chillies, her own recipe, that she had measured and got freshly ground at the neighborhood mill. A staple in my kitchen, it was sealed in a big plastic bag. I can remember the way her hair fell around her shoulder as she deftly sealed the edge over the gas flame of the stove. I can smell her kitchen, a mellow amalgamation of roasted curry leaves, smoky peanut oil, peppers and tamarind and jaggery all laced with the smell of gas. I unearthed from the bottom of the suitcase little gadgets - coconut scraper, pancake turners and scoops and ladles that she had bought, thinking of them as essential for my kitchen.

For a long time I would sit there unable to move, surrounded by the assorted contents of the suitcase, now in small piles around me, overcome with many feelings. Uppermost would float a desire to hear the sounds of morning and to be in the brightness of the Madras sun in my mother's kitchen, hear her voice, smell the sugary coffee, foamy with rich milk, that she would place before me, and suddenly I would see the shape of her hand so vividly that it would hit me like a physical blow.

When I dumped the contents of the carry-on bag next, out would roll the dry roots of turmeric. While I took leave at the threshold of my house in India, hugging my mother close, she had pressed these symbols of safe journey into my hands while bidding me farewell. Not just a safe journey, but a happy sexual life, healthy children and deep contentment, were all packed into the giving and receiving of these two inch pieces of gleaming yellow roots.

Later under the fluorescent light at the Bombay International airport, each time I reached into my pocketbook at the security checks, passport checks, ticket counter, the small, fat, turmeric roots got in my way amidst my wallet, the tickets, passport, and my comb. I needed then to feel like a grown up who can navigate the machinery of international travel, regain my American persona as I arrived at Logan and walk a different walk, talk a different talk, and these yellow roots got in my way. They looked out of place in my sleek Nine West black bag and annoyed me, as though I was someone else, the young woman who took leave with tears in her eyes, so weak. Wanting to throw them away at the airport, and yet unable to, I dropped them into my carry-on and tossed them into any handy drawer available when I reached home.

Now I see these roots in the bottom of a kitchen drawer, eliciting a pang from me every time I see them there among the old Tupperware popsicle molds and hamburger keepers that I never use anymore. I pick up the roots and roll them in my hands. They roll brightly, completely without the utility value they possessed in my mother's kitchen, as an ingredient in her spice blends. As for their symbolic meaning, the sexual politics that underlined it no longer interest me. I look at them and only think how she seemed to fade a little more every time I left her. Suddenly I feel a little lost, the exact same way I felt when the huge, ugly green doors of my kindergarten class closed over her as she stood outside waving to me.

So here they are, these roots, mere objects in my hand. Yet they evoke such feelings in me. The yearning for home. And all that it means. Feelings and emotions overlay and shift: sadness, a funny incident, followed by longing, they flow one into another. If asked I would be unable to isolate any one emotion but just say I am feeling blue. The turmeric roots, quite useless really for any purpose in my American kitchen, have transported me to an emotional place far from my home in Boston, and have become the repository of the mutual emotional connection between my mother and me. They have become in effect what T.S. Eliot calls an "objective correlative," which he defines as "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked."

In his book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner writes "The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs "(14). And later "the first business of the writer must be to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel . . . we must be drawn into the characters' world as if we were born to it" (43).

Why is this important? As humans we absorb our world through our senses and respond to it with feelings. The cumulative effect of these feelings become emotions that compel us to want, to seek, to act, and at other times make us despondent and inert. This is the same process that is captured in fiction. Only through vividly inhabiting the emotional landscape of the characters, with all our senses engaged, do we come to understand how they relate to their world, their motivation and yearnings, their flaws and failing. Our sympathy is aroused for them because even in their imperfection, in their failings and fears, they have become human and we recognize them, regardless of the place or time they occupy.

It is clear then that in creating our characters we need to 1) draw the reader into the fictional world and make him see and feel what our character themselves do, 2) find ways to delineate convincingly the emotional landscape they occupy and, 3) raise a sympathetic response and understanding in the reader as to why the characters feel this way.

In this essay I would like to examine the techniques that writers have in their possession that evoke this all powerful element of fiction - emotion, the characters' own, as well as the reader's response. I will attempt to map the emotional landscape that Hana and Kip inhabit in Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient and examine the different techniques Ondaatje has employed to evoke it. I will trace the way Kip's and Hana's interior feelings are made known to the reader so we are drawn into their world and see and feel what they feel themselves. Finally I will examine how the emotions and feelings interlace in a web to define the characterization and underscore and support the final emotional outburst of Kip's that becomes a pivotal point in the book.

Among the techniques Ondaatje uses that efficiently capture the mood and emotions of his characters and conveys them to the reader through his narrative text are as follows:

• Narrative Tone - A mosaic of several different elements such as the selection of words, the arrangement of these words to shape a sentence, the point of view, the narrative distance, and the voice, tone is the result of the choice the author makes among these elements in some combination or other. In the process he may also reveal an intent or attitude towards the work which produces a response in the reader.

• Details - The enumeration of details of setting and actions in a scene that captures the character's emotion or generates a response in the reader.
• Echo - A scene, an image, an idea or action that echoes an occurrence of a similar incident previously described in the book and thus enhances the emotional value every time the echo occurs.
• Foreshadow - When an event is foreshadowed and then when it takes place it captures an emotional resonance through its occurrence. This works as a reverse technique of what Echo does.
• Filtering - when one character's actions are filtered through the sensibility of another character whereby we pick up both characters' emotions and feelings, the point of view character's emotion as well as the perceived emotion of the observed character, and additionally the effect this has on the first character.

• Concretizing emotion - When an object or an image functions as an icon that holds the meaning and the associated feelings of the character and thus becomes a shorthand. The object or image is then used as a trigger to release or indicate those feeling or emotions, such as those turmeric roots in my kitchen drawer. This works hand in hand with the Echo technique.

I would like to note at this point that these techniques cover a spectrum of complexity in both their execution as well as effect and are not listed in any particular order of weight or importance in the way they function in the novel. What is important to remember, and to observe as we study the examples, is that while it is convenient to break them down this way and isolate them as I have done, the six techniques work together as an interlaced web. The techniques work like chemicals, they react with one another and produce fireworks! Not only are they all equally important, they enhance each other's effect. It is because of the power of the significant details that tone is produced. It is because of the tone that the concretization works, and so on.

We shall begin by examining the way in which we are first drawn into the work in the opening chapter of The English Patient. When the novel opens, we do not know where we are, what century or even the names of the characters. We only see a woman ministering to a man.

Narrative Tone. The scene is unhurried and vivid. Starting from his "destroyed" feet, the gaze travels the body, lifts up to his smile (presumably caused by the sensations), and then pauses at the burns, exposed bone, the wasted body. The choice of words, "murmurs," "hollow," "cool air," "unskins," "flesh of the fruit," creates the sound-effect of smoothness, without jarring angles that disturb. In this comforting sensual scene the words stand in conflict and contrast with the visions that they evoke. Where normally one would expect to find "skin the fruit" Ondaatje "unskins" a fruit, so even within this sensual act of feeding him "flesh of the fruit" the image of the burned man's flesh is evoked by this unusual diction.

The distance is intimate but what makes it intimate? In the first paragraph, the first sentences narrow the narrative distance from "every four days" to today, this moment. Then we lose the perceptive verb "she sees," she notices," etc. by the third sentence. We are immediately bounced right into Hana's sensibility, we see what she sees, and we feel what she feels. The images become lucid: "Beyond purple. Bone." We hear the narrative voice between these lines, and it says something more than what the text says. It points to the depth of the wounds, the kindness in the action, the suffering.

What is it about him that reminds her of Christ, "her despairing saint"? It is not clear why she feels this way but it is enough that she does, as it signals the attitude and commitment she brings to her work. The very acts, his smile, his murmurs, Hana’s interior thoughts in the way she looks at his burnt body, the image of Christ that is evoked by just the mention of the word, lend dignity to the scene as well as to the characters. Thus we are drawn into the novel with the narrative tone that has been set, which is a combination of compassion, suffering, dignity, tenderness, woundedness and healing. Here we see how the author's conscious choice of the elements, words, distance, the shape of sentences, and voice all work together to produce this tone.

Voice in Narrative Tone. At this point I would like to note the role of voice in producing narrative tone. In real life, one's voice, its audible pitch, decibel etc., and one's visible body language would reflect the tone of an interaction such as sad, tender, playful, sympathetic etc. Lacking these cues in writing fiction, the author can use adverbs such as tenderly or sadly etc., to describe the characters and action but it is more likely that he would bring his full arsenal of "show and tell" to render this scene. In the telling of the interaction, the writer constructs a particular voice or maybe even several voices. In the process, she displays an attitude towards the situation. The result of all this is tone. This is the way I have chosen to define tone for the purpose of my discussion.

In his lecture "Behind the Mask" Chuck Wachtel writes about "the writer's, as opposed to, simply, the narrator's presence" in voice, which he says is "the one thing that can cross the border between the real world and the world of art." He believes the writer is never fully concealed, even in a "fully costumed first person" voice (55). The source of this voice in the real world and how it informs the writer's fiction of course belongs in the realm of ideas and theme, a discussion of which is outside the scope of this investigation. Nevertheless, it is indirectly and importantly related because we need to be aware of how the values and world-view we hold seep into the narrative tone through the choices we make in words, their arrangement, and the distance at which we speak through our constructed narrative voice. It is by careful and conscious control of these elements that a response in the form of identification or distance, sympathy or judgment for the characters and the work as a whole is raised in the reader.

Detail. When we look at the passage at another level, outside of the effect of the tone, we see the power of the scene in the detail of the acts of mercy. She doesn't feed him soup with a spoon, she feeds him fresh plum that she peeled with her teeth, pressing the pulp into his mouth with her fingers on his tongue. She doesn't just wash him, there is a communion between the nurse and patient, she loves the contours of his body where it is still whole, blows cool air on his neck. Here we see the interlaced web of tone and details acting on each other and enhancing the effect of the extraordinary tenderness and communion in the scene.

We can see how details interlace with other techniques in the following scene where Hana reveals to Caravaggio why she aborted her pregnancy:

Detail. We see Hana, barely twenty years old, carrying life within her while helping people die horrible, painful deaths, seeing their last gasps of life. The details are vivid, the pathos in worrying about a scratch while dying, the sneer on the soldier's face so close that we recoil. We see the bubble in the mouth, the barely audible pop. Hana's utter horror and feeling of inadequacy in dealing with such a huge experience turns to anger at those who cause this pain, the generals who order the soldiers into the fields but are not there to help them die. The core of her anger is not focused on the Germans or the Japanese, who are distant and faceless, but the insanity of the mindset that causes wars, the way it is waged with such callous disregard to the lives of young soldiers who die for their nations. She is the one who is giving them their last rites, "make them empty their bowels before they die." Death has become up-close and very personal. The details have not only captured Hana's emotional state vividly, engaging all our senses, they also reveal her wisdom in poignant contrast to her youth and raise a response in the reader: a human being dying a horrible death at such a young age is no longer an American or Canadian or the enemy, he is just a man, a soldier, dying.

Echo. Inherent in the details in the passage is this essence of human suffering which transcends borders that are artificially superimposed by nationality. This idea is echoed again in the details that are revealed about Almasy, the English patient whom Hana nurses in the initial scene: his body burnt beyond recognition, his identity completely lost, and he himself, a cartographer and lover of deserts where the shifting sands erase all borders. Hana treats him oblivious to and uncaring of the fact that he may be the enemy, a German spy.

Filtering. We are in Hana's point of view through which the scenes of soldiers dying are filtered, and through her sensibility we too perceive the agony, the fear, and the rage of the dying soldiers. Hana transfers the tenderness and protectiveness she feels towards the child growing inside her to the soldier in her charge. With every one of their deaths, she feels the baby being "washed away" by the daily occurrence of death and suffering, the impossibility of bringing a new life in to such a world. The irony in pregnant Hana administering death through saline solution, the juxtapositioning of her youth and the growing life inside her against the youth and death of the soldiers add another dimension to the emotional resonance: while Hana's anger is focused on the tremendous responsibility placed on her shoulders and for which she is ill-prepared, and which takes a toll on her emotionally and physically, there is also a larger, universal protest against the psychic wounds and suffering caused by wars.

Already her nerves stretched to the limit by the gruesome intimacy of the war, by the personal losses she has suffered, we understand now how nurse Hana "broke" from the trauma of learning of her father's death.

We understand Hana too needed healing while she is nursing the English patient. She is mourning the loss of her father. Hana carries her step-mother Clara's letters with her but does not answer them. "She has missed Clara with a woe, but is unable to write to her, now, after all that has happened to her. She cannot bear to talk or even acknowledge the death of Patrick"(92). The shock she has suffered has made her too numb and unable to function or respond to her world in ordinary ways, caused her to believe in nothing, trusting nothing. We learn the specific circumstances under which her father died only towards the end of the novel, after Kip leaves, when Hana writes to Clara:

It is significant that only at this point, at the end of the book, when Kip leaves after his own emotional breakdown, when she has reached a place emotionally different from where she was in the beginning of the book, that she is able to articulate her thoughts about the death and loss and writes to Clara.

Echo. With this information about the conditions under which her father died our understanding of the first scene we saw in the beginning of the book suddenly deepens although this revelation comes much later, towards the end of the book. These two scenes get linked because there is an echo of the first scene that gets captured in the latter and it enhances the complexity of emotions in both. We sense her deep sorrow and anguish at being separated from her father so far away at the time of his death, "the sadness of geography", when she, a nurse who knew a lot about burning, could have ministered to him. Instead he died alone. She lives with this haunting image of her father dying from burns, alone, abandoned. With this link of burnt victims, the acts of mercy she performs for the anonymous English patient, her unwillingness to have him moved and her decision to stay back in the villa and be his nurse till his death, the Christ image, all these become clear and take on a new meaning and poignancy and resonate in the reader's mind and her characterization deepens.

Foreshadowing. She asks Clara rhetorically, "Do you understand the sadness of geography?" Let us take a closer look at the word "geography" as it is used in the two passages, as a technique of foreshadowing as well as an echo. On a metaphoric level, the news of her father’s death broke Hana psychically with the same catastrophic force as when a bomb he’s defusing explodes and breaks a man’s body, his "geography." The linking of these two images produces an echo effect enhancing our understanding of Hana's pain. It also foreshadows an occurrence that comes later, that of the breakdown that Kip, a sapper, suffers with the bombing of Hiroshima, in the explosion of his emotional "geography." Even though they happen at different places in the plot the word "geography" has linked Kip's reaction to the A-bomb and his emotional destruction, the physical destruction of the body of a sapper, and Hana's own psychic destruction upon the receipt of news of her father’s death by simply placing this sentence in the midst of the passage. We see how the web of interlaced techniques of details, echo, and foreshadow work hand in hand in enhancing each other's effect and the complexity of the fiction. Please keep this letter and the word geography in mind as we will return to them later.

While the effect of the web of interlaced techniques can be intense where it enhances the emotional resonance produced by the various techniques as we have seen in the discussion so far, it can also be subdued so that a particular technique is spotlighted. When Kip enters the lives of the three people in the villa we see him filtered through each of their eyes, but mostly through, and minutely observed by, Hana. I have quoted this overly long excerpt because it characterizes Kip through the minutely observed sensibility of Hana's.

Filtering. While this filtering technique characterizes Kip it does several other things as well. Ondaatje uses this technique quite frequently and with effect, as we saw earlier when the details of the dying soldier were filtered through Hana's recall of the event to Caravaggio. What does this filtering of action through another sensibility do to this passage? It characterizes both, and gets details of two characters embedded in the reader's mind. We experience the same impressions that engage all five senses and the associated feelings that Hana does.

She is watching with borrowed field glasses, snooping really. There is claustrophobic obsession in the minutiae. We smell lavender and the rain that imparts a sensuality. She watches him inside and outside, from different windows and angles, at different times of day, the brown of his body, him washing, his watching her watching him. She senses his inside, "his self-sufficiency," his youth and vigor amidst the extreme woundedness, death and decay that she has been living with, with "relief." From the gross perception of his physicality, his brown skin, his wrist, his chest, his hair, shoulders, we move to the subtle perception of his interior, his courage, his quiet sense of duty, contentment. All this is filtered through Hana who is observing him and gathering impressions, accumulating feelings and they come out of her to us warmed by her growing attachment to him. We hear his boots, see them spit-polished, banging on the stairs, the noise of life. Is Kip "unconsciously in love with his body" or is she? We hear his voice, the cadence. His habit of constantly listening to the radio and bringing news to them at the villa foreshadows the last time he will do this. She watches him sleep.

Hana is falling in love or at least there is a definite attraction. We have watched Kip and we come to know quite a bit about him and his character through the details of his actions, gestures, speech, his attitude, and his interactions, even though they are colored by Hana’s perception. But this coloring is what makes us feel her attraction to him, understand that he makes her feel safe, that his youth and energy invigorate her. This effect is produced by the filtering technique which has done several things at once: drawn us into a vivid world with details that have engaged all five senses, characterized Kip in several dimensions, and clued us in to the dawning of these feelings in Hana.

It is significant that Kip is introduced to us filtered this way, observed with fascination as an "other." He is a foreigner in their midst, distinguished by his turban, by his habits, his color. This fact is also why his emotional characterization lends itself so well to the technique of concretization.

Concretizing emotion is a powerful technique because it condenses many intangible feelings and ideas in a concrete object or a single image. Its power lies in the way the object absorbs the feelings that the character personally invests it with, which may be quite different from what the object actually signifies in the world, and then acts like an icon to release all the inherent emotions associated with it when it is mentioned within the texture of the story.

One reason why Ondaatje's characterizing Kip this way is effective is because the objects that he uses are those that already have very strong connotations to the reader. But these connotations are diminished and reshaped with a different aura when observed through Kip's sensibility and background. For example, the church art he sees through his trek through Tuscany impresses Kip enormously. But he does not see them as Christian art that relates Biblical stories but with his Sikh eyes that are searching for meaning in their expression and beauty unaware of this reference. In the scene where he sees a dramatization of the Annunciation, only the reader recognizes it as such but Kip does not. "An angel and a woman in a bedroom"(279) is what he sees, he does not recognize Mary or the angel Gabriel or the message. He gets a padre to name one of the figures that fascinate him in the Great Hall in Monte Cassino, the face of Isaiah, and about whom he only later learns from his conversations with Almasy. This not only gives a fresh perspective to the way the religious art of Italy, divested of its own significance, is viewed by Kip who invests these statues and paintings with his own feelings, but additionally impacts the reader at a sub-text level who does understand the significance and the reference. And thus concretization becomes a natural means in using this technique for characterizing Kip through his emotions.

Ondaatje uses several objects this way to concretize Kip's emotional landscape which later become significant as his emotional breakdown unfolds. The objects concretized this way are stone statues, the imagined painting, Hana's frock, the bomb, and his rifle. As we know now, the techniques overlap in depicting emotion and here too other techniques such as filtering and echo work in an interlaced web to produce emotional resonance.

The idea of stone as solace first appears to us when we see Kip resting, after a rather difficult and dangerous diffusion of a bomb, when he inadvertently gets Hana to help him with this task that could have killed them both. Hana is asleep by his side, exhausted from the tension of the effort.

Concretizing. While Hana seeks the security of his touch, to be able to sleep deeply as she had not done for a long time, Kip seeks the comfort of inanimate, cold stone to find his security. He has experienced loneliness as a foreigner in the barracks, has survived the death of his only friends in England, the Trinity and Hardy. He lived through the aftermath of the German occupation of Naples. The entire city, with mined corpses, was evacuated for four weeks during which he heard no human voice. The stone statues are the only ones that offer him not only company but also a sense of permanence in a world where danger lurks in every object. Here we see how Kip invests the stone statue with capacity to offer the safety of "a sentinel," to soothe grief, or to offer peace, the solidity of permanence in a world that seems to have none. And he becomes that for Hana, becomes still like the stone statue so she too could find her release in sleep, find in him the safety of a sentinel. When Hana wakes up finally "She could not forget the depth of her sleep, the lightness of the plummet"(106).

Even within Hana's embrace he is still outside of it, the foreigner. Ondaatje uses the device of a painting to concretize the anxiety he feels, his alienation from all human touch, and his sense of the precariousness of his growing attachment to Hana. He cannot afford this attachment to her because his work requires of him to block out all emotions, all images of her. The danger of his work and the idea of death are the flames in the painting and he looks at the elastic of Hana's frock as the fragility of this peace in the center of her embrace, the danger lurking in every object. In this case both these objects, the painting and the frock, have concretized Kip's emotions. Hana and Kip's relationship is based on many needs besides romantic love and there is fragility in such a relationship that stems from needs that they may or may not be able to fulfill. This need that they have for each other comes from very different places. Their love and intimacy help them to find their way back to their humanity which they both had numbed themselves against for different reasons. Kip senses the complexities in it. By using the objects Ondaatje has generated greater emotional resonance than if he had just explained it as anxiety, fear, his love for Hana, insecurity, peace etc.

Kip's complex emotional relationship with the bomb is contained within an object, in this case the bomb itself, which he sees as something more than just a mechanical invention. The irony is in the fact that his profession as a diffuser of bombs has left him with his only human contact in a foreign country, that of the enemy's, who has left long ago, leaving behind only the terrible invention of his mind. It is not human touch but this mind that Kip interacts with, the mind of the enemy's. He needs to be acutely conscious of its working in order to untangle the terrible "joke," the concealed and camouflaged mechanism that triggers the explosion, and diffuse it safely. This way of perceiving the enemy and surmising his character through his invention is a lesson he had learned from his mentor, Lord Suffolk.

Kip's feelings about the enemy's mind and how it thinks, the danger and death inherent in this thinking, and the character of the person who conceived such a thing is thus concretized in the bomb.

Kip carries a rifle and this, too, becomes an object that resonates with other feelings, but this time not for Kip but for the reader. As the head of night patrol Kip is in Gabbice, a coastal town, responding to a signal over the radio that there is enemy movement. This movement turns out to be the Virgin Mary emerging from the sea, and the people of Gabbice Mare bringing her back to safety after protecting her from the German attack.

Filtering. There are human interactions here but they are not of a personal nature. There are the men of the village to whom Kip is a mere anomaly and there is the statue, which is inanimate, and yet there is emotional resonance in this scene. The statue of the Virgin Mary that is brought out from the sea gains a human quality because it is filtered through Kip's eyes, through his sensibility. He follows the procession staying in the background without anyone even seeing him and stands guard.

Mary's face in the darkness reminds him of a sister, a future daughter. Ondaatje brings in the image of a daughter, filtered through Kip's sensibility, a daughter he does not even have experience of having. Yet the idea of a daughter raises a protective feeling in most people and this is what is made concrete by Kip's projecting this feeling of tenderness, as that for a daughter, on to the face of the statue.

So he guards that which is precious to the people of this small coastal village until morning, this statue. It is not their land that they wish to protect, it is their faith, the festival of Virgin Mary. It is her statue that they guard against enemy attack. This strikes a responsive chord in Kip who picks out the beauty that is present around him with his gun's telescope, the beauty that sustains him through the war, his dangerous work, the loss of his dear friends. In this scene with the high contrast of guns, the weapon of destruction, against the children's - their children's - white dresses, their faith, Kip's characterization resonates because his feelings are anchored this way in the scene, by the use of the statue of the Virgin Mary as well as the rifle.

Concretization. We see his use of his rifle throughout the novel, not to shoot from but to use the rifle telescope to pick up sights of church art, of the hawk, to get close-ups of faces of angels, to see the Virgin Mary's face in this scene. How does the rifle characterize Kip's mental landscape? His emotional response to his world, his ability to isolate the beauty amidst the ravages of war is concretized in the rifle that he never uses for the purpose intended - to kill. He uses the bayonet to puncture holes in cans of condensed milk but we never see him use the rifle as a weapon. The line of work he has chosen to do in the war is to defuse bombs––to save lives––not activate them. Here we see how the rifle has become an icon for Kip's pacific attitude but this is not because Kip, being a soldier, views it this way, it is the reader who associates the meaning. It is interesting that while he uses it for the purposes of finding beauty, the fact that he carries the rifle all the time evokes a contrasting resonance, that of safety and at the same time the presence of violence in its function as a weapon.

Ondaatje has carefully mapped the landscape of Kip's feelings and emotions to characterize him so that it underscores the emotional resonance in his final breakdown. We have seen how the tenderness he feels for the people of Gabbice and their faith, his sensitivity to the beauty in the church art, his perception of the bomb not as just inanimate but as the product of a mind, a reflection of the character of the person behind the "joke"––the concealed trigger––have all been now evoked.

While he is a man who is capable of such a variety of emotions and feelings, he has trained himself to be in control of them as well. After an explosion that killed Lord Suffolk he is diffusing a bomb:

He is refusing to think about Lord Suffolk, about his death and that of his other friends, holding back the grief, not quite successfully yet, but something he becomes adept at later. But why does he think the inventor is watching him? The anger he feels for the creator of the bomb that killed the man he had come to adore as a father, is very real to him, it is personal, not just the feelings aroused by the explosion of a bomb. However, he cannot afford to feel the anger that wells up in him and so he blocks that out as well. He is a man who has trained himself to be in total control of his emotions, which he finds necessary for the dangerous work he does, a "warrior-saint."

Kip is also taking on the mantle of responsibility for all the bombs across the city of London, something he thinks was part of the character he respected so much in Lord Suffolk. Suffolk's death has somehow transferred this responsibility on to his shoulders, like from a father to son. He takes this responsibility very seriously and it stays with him even when he leaves the unit and is now in Italy as a sapper.

Interlaced Web of Techniques. What Ondaatje has done here is to set us up for the final episode to come when Kip unleashes his fury at the patient whom he believes to be an Englishman. Almasy, with his real identity erased and mistaken for an Englishman, has become a father-figure again, replacing Lord Suffolk.

The success of the climactic scene depends on the reader's understanding of Kirpal Singh, his unique view of the world colored by the fact that he is part of a colonized people. Outside of his country of birth his identity is closely tied with the color of his skin. He is fighting a war on the side of a colonial power that his own countrymen regard as the enemy. His brother represents the sentiments of Indians who feel distanced from victory in a war that would bring glory to their masters who exploit them. It is not their war; it will not bring peace or justice into their lives. His brother is languishing in prison rather than fight for a Government that he considers his enemy and evil. Hana remembers Kip telling her "When the war came my brother sided with whoever was against the English" (291). The enemy's enemy is a friend.

In spite of all his brother's arguments, Kip enlists in the army in his brother's place because he believes he is made differently.

He has built a defense against the coldness and indifference that he encounters in the barracks when he arrives in England as a new recruit. To counteract the racism that makes him invisible, anonymous, his defense mechanism has been to become self-sufficient, become reserved, wary. However there are chinks in this armor which are pierced by gestures of friendship and trust.

He embraces the warmth and friendship offered by Lord Suffolk, Miss Morden, and Hardy. He gives his trust in return with caution but once given it is steadfast, a pattern that re-occurs in the villa among the four people once Kip's reserve is broken.

We sense a further complexity in Kip's emotional landscape, of trust and betrayal, when he recollects his brother's strong antipathy to the British and opposition to joining the army and his decision to do so. In a chapter which is all about Kip and his experiences in England the following passage appears at the end but in a new section divided by a distinct break:

There is some ambiguity as to who is speaking at first or to whom. The "we" stands on its own until the fourth paragraph following this when we see the pronoun shifting to the first person, and it becomes clear it is Kip who is speaking. This creates a narrative distance by removing Kip's sensibility momentarily and yet filtered through it.

We see the image of the bomb, which has already accumulated meaning for us by the concretizing technique, where it represents the mind, motive, and the character of the inventor behind the device. We see the yellow chalk echoed in the marking of the bodies as well as the bombs, linking them. We see the indignity of it, the bodies marked with chalk the same as bombs were marked, linking Indian bodies deployed to North Africa, to Italy, to Southeast Asia just like so many bombs at the Government's disposal. Bodies are prodded and disinfected with Dettol, examined and branded like cattle, depersonalized and categorized like machines. The effect of presenting this passage, in the first person plural, in such a bland fashion is inversely proportionate to the emotional charge it delivers on the reader. It is produced by the apparent distance created by the plural pronoun as well as the choice of images and association. The reader's sympathy is raised for the indignity suffered. Once we sense it being filtered through Kip later, we think of the narrator, Kip, and know what effect this experience must have had on him and our understanding of his characterization is deepened. The narrative tone thus arises not only from the distance and voice but from the sum of all the techniques employed.

We find Kip relating this to Hana. It is related in plain language, the details, as they happened, nothing more, nothing less. We believe this is the way Kip, who is capable of leaching out all emotions from him in order to concentrate with all his strength on the job at hand, would speak about such an experience.

Water is malleable, invisible, conforms to any shape and can slice through rock. In this half realized scene we can see Kip in his world, the brother fighting the English from jail, "He refused to agree to any situation where the English had power"(200). Kip's invisibility, his non-confrontational nature, his determination to see "reason in all things" is also his strength and what makes it right for him join the British army although he knows his brother, whom he loves, would disdain this action. Through the mentoring he had received from Lord Suffolk, representing for him the best of the English character, of "precise behavior and reason," the faith and trust that was placed on him, the sense of responsibility he feels for the work of defusing bombs, he has come to believe he was part of the British army, the sapper unit, part of "us" doing important work in the war.

And thus with Kip's character, personality and, importantly, the complexity of his emotional landscape firmly loaded in our mind, we arrive at the scene on August 6, 1945.

This is a physical manifestation of deeply felt emotion. Ondaatje has chosen to allow Kip's emotional reaction to the news of the atomic destruction of first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, his emotional turmoil, to be viewed secondhand, filtered through Hana's sensibility. It’s interesting that a moment so powerfully emotional—Kip physically screams here—is rendered through this filter.

Janet Burroway in her book Writing Fiction says :

In a moment like this scene, which has become a culmination of all the emotional set-up in the work, the author would want readers to feel intimacy and identification with and not alienation from Kip. And yet this is what this decision of filtering Kip's emotion would seem to perform, create alienation and detachment through the distance, if we take this definition at face value.

But this is not the case. What has counteracted that effect, of creating detachment and alienation in the reader for Kip, is made up of several things. We have already come to know Kip and Hana by having inhabited their emotional landscape intimately, and the sympathy for Kip and Hana has already been established in the reader's mind. The narrative tone that has illuminated the work has highlighted the meaning of geography, the borderlessness of suffering caused by acts of war, human capacity and need for compassion and healing, and Kip and Hana are in the center of this light. When we see Kip through Hana's sensibility, we see him with her sympathy and understanding of him, with her intimate connection to his emotions, his life and beliefs.

The language that is most effective in describing the intensity of an emotional moment is one that is devoid of highly charged overtones. Less is more. By filtering the emotion-charged scene, Ondaatje has managed to intensify the already unadorned way in which he reports it. We first see Hana misunderstanding his reaction as pain and then see him screaming and buckling as if he is in fact experiencing physical pain. Had he done this from Kip's interior, explain how this news caused him physical pain, he would have lost that edge of distance and verged on melodrama.

Another aspect of being inside Hana's interior, rather than Kip's, is that it allows us to not only sense Kip's own turmoil but it hands us a key to understand Hana's own apprehension of a drastic transformation of her world. She sees him "moving like a steel ball in an arcade game, through the doorway and up the stairs three steps at a time, his breath metronomed, the hit of his boots against the vertical sections of stairs"(282). Moving like a machine, on a warpath. Machines have no emotion but we know Kip is roiling with it. What delighted her once, the banging of his boots against the stairs, the sound that brought life and vigor to the Villa with Kip's arrival now echoes with the sound of doom.

We have clearly seen Kip’s emotional explosion grounded in his actions, and now we hear his voice, which hitherto has been mild, soothing. Now it seethes with wounded sense of betrayal. We hear the reason for his change. The bridge he built from his original wariness and caution about people to "trusting those who befriended him" has collapsed. The best in the English character, "precise behavior" personified by Lord Suffolk, has become tainted. What he had imagined as the implicit contract of trust in the friendship that had existed between him and Lord Suffolk has been broken. The work itself, the mantle of responsibility he had shouldered after Lord Suffolk's death, has lost all meaning and become the "joke," the puzzle left by the creator of the bomb, the trigger that ignites the bomb. Kip who could "see reason in everything" sees the bombing of Japan as an unreasonable response. The bond that had developed between the four broken people in the villa has become a lie, because the bomb invented by a western nation will always place Kip outside the painting, always divide him by his race, by his origin, his geography.

We have seen how each of these objects and words, bomb, painting, geography, have been charged with meaning by means of concretizing, echo and narrative tone. Now they work in an interlaced web to enhance the resonance of this scene. We saw the idea of pacifism and violence concretized at the same time in the rifle in Kip's hand. "The body turns and fires into the old fountain," as if he has become a robot. The rifle is now charged with Kip's anger, his sense of betrayal and images of death, and has become what it is, a weapon of destruction.

He trains the rifle at the Englishman’s throat. We see the irony of a man who has developed nerves of steel defusing bombs, falling apart over an explosion several thousand miles away. He is prepared to use his rifle to kill a man he loved once, who at this point represents Lord Suffolk and all that he had come to love about the British through this friendship and the trust that was placed on him. But the English patient now stands as the personification of the mind behind the invention, the way Lord Suffolk had taught him to perceive an invention. We see in Kip's shuddering the tremendous amount of control that he requires to overcome the tumult in his mind which fluctuates between what he calls the Europeans, the white race, "American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman. . . . You all learned it from the English," who have drawn the line between "us" and "them" and the English patient, the man he has come to know and love, the individual. Kip has succumbed to his emotions and has lost the power to reason.

Kip's relationship to Britain as a nation, her people, his role in the war for Britain's victory, intersects sharply with his suppressed awareness of the coldness and racism he had encountered as a foreigner, the state of colonization and oppression of India and Indians by Britain, his brother's fury and protest, and suddenly he finds he is not that different from his brother, that he had been in a state of denial all along. He is now mouthing his brother's words, he feels what his brother feels. All the complexities in Kip's emotional landscape converge at this point.

We have arrived at the climactic place. We have Kip who has, in his reaction to the bombing of Hiroshima, set in motion an emotional roller coaster that has crashed into the lives of the other three. Almasy, who has survived his ordeal by living with his memories thus far with spirit, has lost hope. His action is that of total dejection and resignation.

Kip regains control over his rage but his actions and thoughts indicate permanent change in his emotional landscape, "He has left the three of them to their world, is no longer their sentinel"(286). The rifle is now a metaphor, a defanged snake. He catches Hana in the periphery of his vision but he no longer feels that if he could "touch her he would be sane"(113) but walks away from her. His emotions have overpowered his reason and he is unable to separate the politics of geography from his personal relationships with people.

Filtered through Caravaggio we see Hana’s and Kip’s pain, the echo of Hana's frock, which has concretized Kip's sense of the fragility of his peace in her embrace. The narrative distance closes in, leaps into Caravaggio's thoughts, "They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation."

We see Hana realizing Kip has gone to an emotional place far away from her when she meets him at the chapel, leaning on his motorbike.

Kip has become the stone, which once held the concretization of comfort and safety, but he can no longer give her that, he leans away from her. Kip's emotional breakdown is complete and profound. He has lost the connection that had once bound their mutual needs together and can only see her as the "other."

Intent in Narrative Tone. Remember I asked you to keep in mind Hana's letter and the word geography, which we had examined earlier, near the beginning of the discussion? We shall return to it now. We have seen the irretrievable change in the emotional landscape of the characters above. It is after this and upon Kip's departure that Hana writes the letter to Clara.

Let us for a moment examine the way Ondaatje uses the idea of geography through out the work. The setting in the novel renders in detail the contrast of the war ravaged country, mined with bombs, and the life-affirming beauty of the surrounding Tuscany valley, the orchards and gardens, the skies and the stars. Nature intrudes into the space of the mined and mortar-shelled villa and erases borders:

The English Patient, an expert cartographer of the deserts of North Africa, disillusioned by a war that made friends into the enemy says, "I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. Madox died because of nations"(136).

His "borders" of identity as well as physical features, his geography, erased by burning, Almasy recalls his Katherine's death in the caves:

The wounded villa turned hospital now harbors the four inhabitants, each of them shell-shocked, lost and scarred, drained physically and emotionally by the war. Their nationalities, boundaries, dissolve here just as the walls have disappeared in the villa. Caravaggio the spy, inventor of identities, thinks with no barriers to shield them each of them are shedding their defenses, revealing themselves.(117)

In their act of healing the other, each of the four inmates of the villa begin their own healing process, to make the journey from their ruined and charred inside to the beauty that exists outside, captured in the mountain tops and vistas, the paintings and murals, the church art and statues of Italy. What becomes a symbiotic existence among the four dissimilar people, hidden in that ruined villa, forgotten by the rest of the world and its wars, is violently torn asunder when news of the bombing of Hiroshima arrives through the shortwave radio.

Turning our attention back to the letter, through his diction Ondaatje evokes the idea of geography implicitly as in the passages we have seen in our discussion above, as well as explicitly in Hana's letter. His use of the word "geography" where he could have as easily used instead "body" or "distance" is an unconventional and intentional use of the word and therefore draws attention.

Ondaatje could have as easily connected us intimately to Hana's sensibility by making her think these thoughts, even addressed them to Clara in her thoughts. Instead she places her thoughts in a letter, immediately causing a distance, giving a different form to her words. Our thoughts express themselves differently as they bubble up in our mind or when they pour out hot and directly into speech, than when they are written down on paper. They take on a formality when they are cold and black and white on paper, they gain authority. The way "the sadness of geography" is positioned in these passages, as well as all through the work, and the device of a letter are choices the author has made––in the distance created, in the diction, and in the shape of the sentences.

What is Ondaatje trying to say over and over?

Steven Schwartz, in his essay "Finding a Voice in America," writes that it is "between the lines where one hears the "intent" of the voice." Is there an intent in the narrative voice here, and do we hear it between the lines in this book? And more importantly, as it relates to the subject of this essay, does it evoke a response in the reader?

As she writes this letter to Clara, after Kip's departure, Hana now has in her emotional landscape, in addition to her sad memory of her father's death, the sadness of losing life, the baby she chose to abort; the death of the baby's father, her lover; the individual sadness endured by Almasy and Caravaggio; the sadness of Kip's leaving as a consequence of the bombing, and along with his departure the loss of the small amount of peace and the beginning of a healing, even some joy, that she had derived from his company. After stating she is sick of Europe she asks Clara, "who had articulated fury when they all left for the war" (91), "How did you become so smart? How did you become so determined? How were you not fooled like us?"(296) The nurse who at one time believed in a war and offered her services as a nurse now feels she was fooled. She is disillusioned with the war and its cause and its effect.

The "sadness of geography" thus no longer signifies just Hana's personal sadness of distance from her father at the time of his death, but encompasses her discovery of a greater meaning of this sadness, the sadness of geography, of the world and how it is divided, the politics of borders, and the suffering of those caught between those borders. By the choices the author has made in the elements of techniques he has not only created the resonance of narrative tone, but we see here the "intent" in the voice. It rises through the web of interlaced techniques of tone, details, filtering, foreshadowing, concretization and echo that we have discussed, permeates the different passages, and acts like a back-light in illuminating the work.

The emotions and feelings that accompanied my return trips from India where my mother lived are in the past, as she has passed away. I have grown older and have a family of my own. But the longing for home and the emotions that give rise to it still occupy some space in my mind, although their nature has changed. They color the way I see my world in terms of home and away, of arriving and departing, of belonging and alienation and these in some way or other seep into my thoughts, in the themes I choose to explore, in the choices I make in putting words down on paper.

The objects that I unpacked from my trips to and from my home in India are like little party favors that with a flick of a finger explode into ribbons or paper stars. The feelings they unravel spiral me into a certain mood, recreates images from the past, and echoes with feelings. Emotions become so intense sometimes that they interlay over one another and flow so rapidly that I cannot always name them, all I can say then is I am moved. To achieve the same effect in a work of fiction, of being moved, and being moved in a particular way, the writer creates a world, places her characters in a time and place and by means of all the elements of fiction such as plot, setting, character etc., that are available to her, and the techniques such as those we examined in Ondaatje's novel, gets access into the reader's mind and manages to elicit an emotional or sympathetic response.

The elements of fiction that the writer has at his disposal to draw his reader into his fictional world and to listen to what he has to say, such as the setting, the period, the climate, the structure, are only a shell. Ultimately it is the characters and what they feel that connects us as humans to them and their fictional world. The complete depiction of this emotion in all its complexity combined with the tone, specifically the voice of the narrator, which after all is infused with what the writer knows but does not state explicitly as he would in an essay, are the crucial aspects that raise readers' sympathy and keeps it engaged in the story. The idea that the writer toys with–– the theme, the subtext, the spirit behind the text, whatever term we call it by––filters through the story, seeps into the reader, bit by tiny bit, to be absorbed, mulled over, reinforced, and then blooms into her consciousness, invades her space and steps into it. The reader is fully engaged.

Notes:

Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction. New York: Harper Collins, 1996

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. New York: Vintage Books, 1993

Schwartz, Steven. "Finding a Voice in America." Bringing the Devil to His Knees. ed.

Charles Baxter & Peter Turchi. U of Michigan Press, 2001 (59)

Wachtel, Chuck. "Behind the Mask: Narrative Voice in Fiction." Bringing the Devil to

His Knees. ed. Charles Baxter & Peter Turchi. U of Michigan Press, 2001 (60)